New Nuclear

A NEW park and ride for 1,500 vehicles has opened near Bridgwater to reduce traffic to and from Hinkley Point C. The new service was opened by EDF Energy, just off the A38 Dunball Roundabout, off junction of the M5. The park and ride has parking for up to 1,500 vehicles so workers can travel to and from the Hinkley Point C site by bus. The facility can also handle up to 85 HGVs, enabling smaller loads to be bulked into larger single loads to reduce the number of lorries delivering to the site.

EDF Energy is building a new campus on the site of a former plastics factory off Bath Road, designed to accommodate up to 850 workers for Hinkley Point C. The campus will include a canteen, laundry and gym, along with one full-size and two five-a-side football pitches which the public can use. The access road to the campus is located opposite Frederick Road, and involves traffic lights and new filter lanes for the junction. A residential street in eastern Bridgwater will close permanently at one end next month as part of a project connected to construction of the Hinkley Point C power station. From early March, Frederick Road will no longer have a junction with the A39 Bath Road, with access onto the latter being “stopped up”.

The National College for Nuclear is the latest of the five specialist colleges set up by the government to develop technical skills Thousands of engineers and technicians are set to be trained at a new college specialising in nuclear energy. The National College for Nuclear opened on Wednesday and has hubs in Cumbria (Lakes College) and Somerset (Bridgwater and Taunton College). The facility is one of five National Colleges set up by the government as part of its industrial strategy. The other colleges already open include the College of Creative and Cultural Industries; Digital Skills and High-Speed Rail.

A new £7.5million pound facility to train future generations of nuclear workers has opened in west Cumbria today. The National College for Nuclear at Lillyhall is the first of five of colleges opening around the UK to support skills development in key industries, funded by the Department for Education.

Bridgwater firms struggling to recruit skilled staff in wake of Hinkley C. MANY businesses in Bridgwater claim they are facing difficulties recruiting staff because they struggle to compete with wages offered by EDF Energy at Hinkley C. At a ‘Meet Your MP’ event held by Bridgwater Chamber of Commerce at the Somerset Energy Innovation Centre on Friday (January 2), one of the main concerns highlighted by business representatives was the cost of business rates and recruitment issues. David Pomeroy, managing director of family business Monmouth Scientific, said: “The price for land for business use is astronomically expensive. “I am considering moving part of my business out of the town – I do not want to, I am Bridgwater born and bred – but if I were to move part of my business to Warrington, I could rent for half the price and there would be staff readily available whereas it is proving more and more difficult to recruit here. I have advertised three jobs in the past 10 days, these are well-paid, full-time service engineer jobs which allow people to travel around the country but there are not enough skilled workers in the town. “And it is not just skilled workers, when we used to advertise for an office assistant you could get 150 applications, now we get less than 15.”

13 new steel-fixing apprentices join the on-site team at Hinkley Point C. EDF Energy’s Hinkley Point C contract partner BYLOR has recruited 13 new steel-fixing apprentices to join its on-site team – six of whom are from the local area. BYLOR is a joint venture between Bouygues TP, a worldwide construction organisation with considerable experience in the nuclear sector, and Laing O’Rourke, the UK’s largest privately-owned engineering and construction contractor.

The new UK chief executive of French reactor vendor, EDF Energy, the Italian Simone Rossi, (who has 14 years working experience with EDF) is reported as suggesting that “experience from previous projects will allow EDF to build another [nuclear] power station […] at Sizewell in Suffolk, eastern England, with 20 per cent lower costs than Hinkley [C nuclear plant]. The problem with Mr Rossi’s view is history ( which he experienced first-hand inside EDF) demonstrates the opposite experience, with the very nuclear-experienced EDF demonstrating almost uniquely in large-scale industrial construction, a ‘negative learning curve ” ie matters get worse, not better, with experience, in its nuclear fleet.

The £7.5 million National College for Nuclear is due to be officially opened today. The college, at Lillyhall, near Workington, will train thousands of technicians and engineers to support Britain’s future nuclear programmes, create cleaner energy and provide a highly skilled workforce. The National College for Nuclear will have hubs in Cumbria and Somerset and facilities which include virtual, simulated laboratories. It is one of five national colleges being established by government as part of its Industrial Strategy.

The developer behind the planned £10bn nuclear power plant in Anglesey has brought in EDF generation development director to lead its nuclear operations team. Gwen Parry-Jones joins Wylfa developer Horizon as its director of nuclear operations after more than five years as head of generation at Hinkley-developer EDF. Ms Parry-Jones will start her role in April which see her lead work around developing the onsite development of the Wylfa site. The appointment comes after Horizon’s backers Hitachi completed a crucial government assessment for its ABWR reactor technology, and months before the project team submits its main planning permission. Ms Parry-Jones, who is from Anglesey, began her career working at Wylfa on the decommissioned Magnox power plant next door to the new Horizon site. Her 30-year career has seen her take on roles as station director at Heysham Nuclear Power station, Lancashire, before becoming EDF’s head of generation.

The UK’s Hinkley Point C has become a critical test of developers’ ability to compete with cheap gas and renewables. Across an expanse of scarred earth the size of 250 football pitches beside the Bristol Channel in south-west England, 3,000 workers are building what will be, by some estimates, the most expensive structure on the planet. At a cost of almost £20bn, the Hinkley Point C power station in Somerset is the first nuclear plant to be built in the UK since the 1990s. Clusters of cranes and cement silos loom over a warren of earthworks crawling with excavators and 100-tonne dumper trucks. At the centre of the site, foundations are taking shape for two 1.6 gigawatt reactors intended to meet 7 per cent of UK electricity demand, with a target for completion by the end of 2025. Hinkley is crucial to UK energy security as the country faces the closure of old coal and nuclear plants accounting for about 40 per cent of the country’s reliable electricity generating capacity by 2030. But it also has wider significance as a test of the industry’s ability to compete in a rapidly changing energy landscape. Nuclear power has been under threat since the meltdown at the Fukushima plant in Japan in 2011 revived safety fears. But the biggest threat is now economic as the spiralling cost of building new reactors collides with a world of cheap and plentiful gas and renewable power. The UK is now one of the few western countries committed to renewing its ageing reactors. More than 70 per cent of the 448 reactors around the world are in the OECD club of wealthy nations, and more than half of them are at least 30 years old. Many will reach the end of their operational lives in the next two decades, yet the prospects of replacing them are uncertain, at best, in countries such as the US, Japan and France, while others including Germany, Switzerland and South Korea are planning to phase out nuclear power altogether. The days of networks dominated by a few large, centralised power stations are drawing to a close, according to many analysts. In their place will come more dispersed sources of renewable generation. Battery storage and digital “smart grid” technology will help smooth out supply and demand, and increase efficiency. Tom Burke, chairman of E3G, an environmental think-tank, says there will be no room in this new world of flexible, decentralised generation for large, rigid nuclear reactors. “There are going to be increasingly frequent periods when we have too much power,” says Mr Burke. “But if you are the energy minister, how do you explain to people why you are having to switch off cheap renewables in order to use the much more expensive nuclear power which you have committed to pay for over the next 35 years?” Progress at Hinkley, therefore, is being watched as closely in Beijing as in Paris and London. A repeat of the delays at Olkiluoto and Flamanville could sign the death warrant for western reactor developers, while dealing a setback for China’s international expansion. Mr Rossi is aware of the high stakes: “We need to make sure that Britain will be happy about the choice it made.”

Foratom, the European nuclear trade body, commenting on the European Commission’s ‘Clean Energy for All Europeans’ plan, says the EU’s aim to decarbonise the economy by over 80% by 2050 cannot be achieved without nuclear power. ‘Nuclear energy accounts for half of the low-CO2 base-load electricity currently generated in the EU. It provides reliable low-CO2 base-load electricity and can provide the flexibility of dispatch required to balance the increasing share of intermittent energy sources, hence continuing to contribute to security of supply.’ It wants an end to preferential treatment and ‘priority dispatch’ rules for renewables. They are not alone in pressing the case for nuclear. The World Nuclear Association is looking to an extra 1000 GW of nuclear capacity globally by 2050, while a Global Nexus Initiative report says it will be extremely hard, if not impossible, to meet the Paris COP21 climate goals ‘without a significant contribution from nuclear power’- globally 4000 GW will be needed by 2100. Given the somewhat constrained situation facing the nuclear industry at present, stuck at around a 11% global contribution while renewables roar ahead to 24% and beyond, with prices continually falling, is there any reality in these nuclear ambitions? With a range of renewables accelerating ahead globally, and their costs falling fast, perhaps it’s time to move on.

The Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) says that ‘New nuclear plants can form a major part of an affordable low carbon transition in the UK with potential roles for both large nuclear and small modular reactors’. However, while Small Modular Reactors ‘could be cost-effective’, more work was needed on them, and it said that its ‘evidence base on energy system planning indicates the best way forward is for the UK to seek to secure the delivery of a programme of contemporary large GW light water reactors’. Although it warns that ‘an inability to “get match fit” and demonstrate cost reductions will result in other options – such as renewables – becoming more prevalent in a future UK energy system.’ Globally, nuclear power is in retreat. It makes you wonder why the UK amongst others is still clinging on to nuclear… Some say, with no other explanation seemingly available, it’s just to keep the technical capacity alive, since that’s needed for the nuclear weapons and the nuclear submarine programme: Surely it can’t be as simple as that? Even in the allegedly more pro-nuclear UK, current BEIS polling suggests that only around 35% support nuclear power and a YouGov poll found that 62% of respondents would be unhappy living within five miles of a Small Modular Reactor.

[Machine Translation] EPR Flamanville: four questions on an industrial disaster. Seven years late and a quote that has tripled in ten years: the site of the EPR Flamanville Friday received the visit of Sébastien Lecornu, Secretary of State Nicolas Hulot. Started in April 2007, the EPR was to cost € 3.3 billion and enter service in 2012. Except that the site has accumulated the setbacks, the highlight of which was in April 2015, after the discovery by the ASN of a anomaly in the steel of the lid and bottom of the reactor vessel. In June 2017, EDF obtained authorization from the ASN to operate the tank, but confidence in EPR technology has been eroded. The bill exploded: around € 11 billion.

Clients have included Greenpeace, Nuclear Free Local Authorities, WWF Scotland and the UK Government’s Committee on Radioactive Waste Management.

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